> 20% increased risk of death or disease over the span of a generation is not worth getting excited about? For someone who's healthy, it may seem insignificant when the baseline risk is low, but for someone who develops a chronic disease, in hindsight a 20% reduction may be very appealing. Minimizing regret is important.T
You should read the article; the rest of the paragraph is as follows:
> So with lung cancer we could buy as a society the observation that cigarettes cause lung cancer because it was and remains virtually impossible to imagine what other factor could explain an association so huge and dramatic. Experiments didn’t need to be done to test the hypothesis because, well, the signal was just so big that the epidemiologists of the time could safely believe it was real. And then experiments were, in effect, done anyway. People quit smoking and lung cancer rates came down, or at least I assume they did. (If not, we’re in trouble here.) When I first wrote about the pseudoscience of epidemiology in Science back in 1995, “Epidemiology Faces It’s Limits”, I noted that very few epidemiologists would ever take seriously an association smaller than a 3- or 4-fold increase in risk. These Harvard people are discussing, and getting an extraordinary amount of media attention, over a 0.2-fold increased risk. (Horn-blowing alert: my Science article has since been cited by over 400 articles in the peer-reviewed medical literature, according to Thomson Reuter’s Web of Knowledge.)
The point is that we don't know if there's a 20% increase of risk if you start eating more red meat. We only know that the people who elected to do, and were sampled in the study (the top quintile), did have a 20% increase. There's a big difference here; statistics is subtle.
> As for scientific validity of those studies, doing proper scientific studies of diet is so difficult it might as well be impossible.
I agree, but then we should refrain from telling people that meat, and red meat in particular, is what's killing them. Especially when there are much more likely targets, like sugar.
If you blame sugar, you get the sugar lobby making similar arguments about poor scientific data for the proposition "sugar increases risk of diseases" that you're making against the proposition "red meat increases risk of diseases".
You should read the article; the rest of the paragraph is as follows:
> So with lung cancer we could buy as a society the observation that cigarettes cause lung cancer because it was and remains virtually impossible to imagine what other factor could explain an association so huge and dramatic. Experiments didn’t need to be done to test the hypothesis because, well, the signal was just so big that the epidemiologists of the time could safely believe it was real. And then experiments were, in effect, done anyway. People quit smoking and lung cancer rates came down, or at least I assume they did. (If not, we’re in trouble here.) When I first wrote about the pseudoscience of epidemiology in Science back in 1995, “Epidemiology Faces It’s Limits”, I noted that very few epidemiologists would ever take seriously an association smaller than a 3- or 4-fold increase in risk. These Harvard people are discussing, and getting an extraordinary amount of media attention, over a 0.2-fold increased risk. (Horn-blowing alert: my Science article has since been cited by over 400 articles in the peer-reviewed medical literature, according to Thomson Reuter’s Web of Knowledge.)
The point is that we don't know if there's a 20% increase of risk if you start eating more red meat. We only know that the people who elected to do, and were sampled in the study (the top quintile), did have a 20% increase. There's a big difference here; statistics is subtle.
> As for scientific validity of those studies, doing proper scientific studies of diet is so difficult it might as well be impossible.
I agree, but then we should refrain from telling people that meat, and red meat in particular, is what's killing them. Especially when there are much more likely targets, like sugar.